Our docs are nominated for the 2020 DevPortal Awards!

bravegrape — Thu, 08 Oct 2020 16:07:36 +0000

For the second year in a row, the Adyen documentation and API Explorer are nominated for the DevPortal Awards. The DevPortal Awards are a way for the API community to recognize, celebrate, and learn from the world’s greatest developer portals and their API documentation.

You can help us win the award for the Best Overall Developer Portal — register and vote for us before 31 October!

We’ve set a high bar for ourselves 🏅🏅

Last year, we won two DevPortal awards. Our API Explorer was awarded the Best API Reference Documentation for innovation and ease of use. The Adyen documentation was awarded the Best Decision Maker Documentation for content and UX improvements that help create a unified experience across our online resources.

So where do we go from here? In the last year, we’ve been working hard on improving developer experience but also on improving our less technical content.

Better onboarding for everyone 🙌

Everyone’s a beginner when faced with a new API. Because Adyen integrations are built on powerful APIs, we focused on making sure developers can quickly get to that first successful API call. Because a lot of developers learn by breaking things, we’ve built and documented example payments integrations, complete with a functioning ecommerce website!

To give our merchants the confidence that their integration is ready to accept live payments, we are using the power of checklists. For example, our go-live checklist for online payment integrations lists all the things our merchants need to tick off before going live.

We know from research that developers are not the only users of our portal. Setting up a payment integration also involves people working on compliance, reporting, and risk management. To help our merchants plan their integration work efficiently across disciplines, we published a step-by-step overview of the whole process.

People have different content preferences, so we’ve also been working on alternative ways of getting people familiar with how Adyen works. For example, our page about managing payments through the Customer Area dashboard has the same content in both text and video format.

Helping users make the right choices 🤔

Making choices is hard, and Adyen offers a lot of choices for integrating. To avoid choice overload, the documentation helps merchants make the right choices for their business. To help merchants navigate the complex topic of in-store refunds, for example, we give clear contextual information and use cases for the available options.

Compliance can be very intimidating, especially for merchants without in-house expertise. We published a compliance guide so our merchants know which requirements they need to meet for their Adyen integration type.

We’ve also been working on making sure our APIs are intuitive for our end-users. Despite the pandemic, we organized virtual feedback sessions on topics related to API design and community engagement.

Improving our API reference and documentation 📃

Last year, we won the award for Best API Reference documentation. Not wanting to rest on our laurels, we stepped up our game even more in 2020.

Few things are more upsetting than an example code block that doesn’t work — both for the developer and for the writer! By working on automating and testing the code samples in our documentation, we make sure our users have code snippets that work, and our writers spend a lot less time creating and maintaining those snippets.

To make it easier to stay up to date, we revised our online payments release notes, which include updates about the APIs as well as the web and mobile integration components. Following feedback from the community, we also set up a monthly developer newsletter so people can get updates directly in their inboxes.

Vote for us! ✅

You can help us win the award for the Best Overall Developer Portal!

Technical careers at Adyen

We are on the lookout for talented engineers and technical people to help us build the infrastructure of global commerce! If you are interested in finding out more, check out our Developer vacancies, or see Careers at Adyen.

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Originally published at https://www.adyen.com on October 8, 2020.

Having inclusive names in docs examples

bravegrape — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 21:33:24 +0000

We want to make the names we use in our docs examples more inclusive from both a gender and a cultural perspective.

We use a docs-as-code approach to docs so we're interested in automation and scalable approaches.

Is this something you or your team have worked on?
Could you recommend any best practices in approaching this?

Thank you!

DEV Community: bravegrape